Hi,

Are there some kind of best practices re moving content between two installations of WordPress/bbPress with matching versions?

Let’s say I need to move users and their bbPress posts from one host to another. Naturally, I’d go for WXR. Except it doesn’t work exactly as expected.

After importing all users, forums, topics and replies I get a forum where all counts are correct, but content isn’t displayed (“This forum is empty.”, “Oh bother! No topics were found here!”).

OK, I’ve seen that before with other engines where I need to recreate indices. So I go to forum repair, but as soon I click “Recalculate last activity in each topic and forum”, all counts go to zero, and “Freshness” for each forum becomes “No Topics”. No matter what repairs I run next, all counts are at zero.

In the admin console the list of topics is blank indeed, but all replies are listed and not assigned to any topic.

Obviously, I’m not the first person to try doing this. How did you solve that?

Or maybe there’s a better way to merge databases?

Both hosts have WordPress 3.5.1 and bbPress 2.2.4. Recipient host has WordPress Importer 0.6.

Thanks in advance.

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 10 months ago]

Are all the users being imported correctly?

This has been the only real issue I have seen mentioned when using WXR… Once you get over ~100 users things just start getting nasty as there is no pagination for the users section.

There are a few options to also help debug the issue

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-importer/other_notes/

Set `define( ‘IMPORT_DEBUG’, false );` to true as noted here.

I haven’t looked at the specifics of what is different in the ‘development version’ over 0.6 but from a quick look there has been some updates on WXR error checking.
https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-importer.zip

[@prokoudine Participant 11 years, 10 months ago]

Oh, interesting. Indeed, not all users got imported: only 215 out of 407.

I’ll have a look at the debug options later today (hopefully), thanks!

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 10 months ago]

Yep… That seems to be the main issue, once you have the users in everything is fine…

Let me know how it goes… At some stage this user issue needs fixing in the WordPress Importer.

[@capacitron Participant 11 years, 3 months ago]

I wonder if using WXR Splitter (http://www.rangerpretzel.com/content/view/20/1/) and breaking up the file into 10 managable parts and importing them one at a time might do the trick. What are your thoughts?

My current problem is trying to associate/map 400 users from one wp install to another. They always end up being associated with the administrator account by default. Can you imagine going through 400 pull down menus for each occurrence? That would make for a fun afternoon.

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 3 months ago]

Take a look at the GSoC project by @frederickding

It’s an update to the WXR importer, I haven’t tried/tested this yet to see what’s different or how well it works with bbPress, but it looks promising.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/author/frederickding/

If you do give it a try I’d love to hear any feedback you have.